DotNetNuke Social Integrates Communities with your Website

One part of your Digital marketing strategy is to have a presence on many of the popular social networks. Another is to have your own community tied tightly to your website, something DotNetNuke now supports.

A Social Web Experience

DotNetNuke was already social. We covered its official foray into social in March 2012 when it released an entire set of social tools in version 6.2. Those social features covered all the standard stuff, including:

Activity streams

Social relationships

Groups and forums

User profiles

Private messages

Member directory

Social authentication with Facebook, Google, Windows Live and Twitter

But that was just the beginning. Now, with over 2,200 commercial customers and over 8 million downloads of the DotNetNuke platform, DNN is entering the "engagement age". DNN recognizes many organizations are developing social communities for external customers and that there are integration challenges that can lead to social silos.

Enter the Social CMS

DNN takes its social features to a new level, adding a number of new capabilities including:

A unified comment system built into all the social tools, which means commenting in one place also shows up in other locations offering a seamless experience.

Support for events (physical and virtual)

Discussions

Ideation

Blogs

Gamification

Social Analytics

Social Analytics are key to any community solution and DNN Social allows you to track activity by user, date, or group. There is an analytics dashboard (shown below) that allows you to track how your community is engaged.

Gamification is built on this analytics platform, focusing on recognition and incentives. You can customize the rules to suit your needs, implement rewards, badges and all the things that come with most gamification solutions. Having the gamification features built on the analytics allows you quickly see how changes to the analytics rules affect gamification.

DNN Social Communities

DNN Social is built from the ground up and is pre-configured to integrate seamlessly with your Web CMS. It supports simple user management with a single identity (which can be a social login provider if you choose).

As it's built on the DNN platform, you get a consistent user experience with the website and you can leverage the content management capabilities. It's also very extensible through third party modules and skins, and DNN's public API (.Net and Web Services). A couple of sample of extensions include e-commerce integration and integration of LMS tools (learning management).

However, if you want, you can deploy DNN Social Communities as a standalone solution.

A couple of interesting notes for what may be coming with DNN in future releases include marketing automation integration and sentiment analysis integration for deeper analytics.

There's a fair amount of demand for "owned" communities today. It's a key element of any marketer's digital strategy. But it's also an important element for customer service for many organizations. Tight integration with the Web CMS should provide some nice content sharing capabilities, including those shared comments mentioned above.

Headed in the right direction, DNN is growing its web experience base with a strong set of offerings.